Simpson on Sunday: Mandela's criticism will not alter bombing tactics

By John Simpson

12:01AM GMT 06 Jan 2002

NELSON MANDELA has often done a rather good line in embarrassing Western governments.

He has publicly thanked Col Gaddafi of Libya for supporting the anti-apartheid movement, for instance, and praised his statesmanship; he has been to the White House and given the president a public dressing-down, and upbraided the British prime minister in Downing Street.

At such moments, Western leaders are obliged to stand alongside him at press conferences and take it all with a fixed smile, knowing the moral authority that the man possesses.

Last week the smiles were more fixed than ever, when Mr Mandela withdrew his support for President Bush's war against terror and apologised to Muslims for what the Americans, with strong British and European support, have been doing in Afghanistan.

It won't change American tactics in the short run: they will continue to bomb places and vehicles which they believe contain al-Qaeda or Taliban targets, and the chances are that they will continue to kill innocent civilians in the process.

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This may well mark the moment when private unease about the campaign in Afghanistan can surface openly, no longer inhibited by the inevitable feelings of anger and horror about the attacks of September 11.

During the past week I have spoken to people in half a dozen countries, including France, Iran, and South Africa, about the American campaign. All were, in broad terms, favourable to the basic right of the United States to hit back after being attacked; even the senior figure I spoke to in Teheran.

Yet they would all, I think, have agreed with a Cambridge friend of mine, who characteristically quoted Shakespeare's Measure for Measure: "Oh, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength: but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant."

The problem is the same as it has been ever since the Gulf war, 10 years ago. Blasting away from a height of 15,000ft at tiny dots in the landscape may be safer for the bombers and the men and women who fly them; but it is impossible for them to avoid making occasional mistakes.

And the mistakes, whether in Baghdad in 1991, Belgrade in 1999, or Afghanistan in 2001, eventually come to characterise the entire campaign.

Directly the mistakes are made, opinion begins to swing away from an awareness of the original crimes - the invasion of Kuwait, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians, the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington - and towards a concentration on the methods used to punish them.

In a world that moves swiftly, the atrocities of four months ago lose their hold on our memories directly they are overlaid by later disasters.

Worse, America's enemies will quickly present it as another case of the world's most powerful nation attacking the ordinary people of some Third World country because their government has dared to disagree with the line decreed by Washington.

Curiously, sending in ground forces doesn't seem to create the same impression. Soldiers are soldiers: some may be better trained and better equipped than others, but they do not carry with them quite the same sense of a wealthy, high-tech society punishing a weaker, poorer nation for the crime of being anti-American. Or at any rate, nothing like as ferociously as B-52 bombers and cruise missiles do.

The B-52s and the rest of the American armoury were very useful in softening up the Taliban defences before the Northern Alliance attacked them in November; and at the time, watching the slow progress of the bombing, I even felt it needed to be intensified.

But once the military phase was over and the war turned into a manhunt, the bombing took on something of its old Baghdad and Belgrade character. Civilians started to die, as they had already been dying in Kabul and Kandahar in the earlier stages of the bombing.

What turned Mr Mandela from being a supporter of the American action into a critic was this business of dropping bombs on civilians. The Taliban and al-Qaeda were soldiers; useless ones, maybe, but they volunteered, wore uniforms, and took up weapons. They had no one else to blame but themselves if they got killed.

It may well be that the laws of war and of the right of self-defence support American actions. But there is something beyond the legal rights and wrongs of the case, which matters even more: the opinion of ordinary people around the globe.

Like the Pope, they have no divisions. Mr Mandela does not even have a job nowadays (and, as he famously said on his visit to Magdalene College, Cambridge, last May, he also has a very bad criminal record).

But a wise administration in Washington would take notice of his shift of opinion. He represents the feelings - often private and unexpressed - of a great many people.